


Tabula Rasa

by princ3ssf33t



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Parental Hera Syndulla, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Sibling bickering, but my shipper heart took control, there wasn't supposed to be as much kanera in this as there is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:01:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23951992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princ3ssf33t/pseuds/princ3ssf33t
Summary: After the disastrous mission to Malachor, the Ghost crew is stuck in a cloud of grief. Tensions are high and the return to normalcy is a long road ahead of them. But Hera is willing to make an effort to regain it.or, Hera just wants dinner with her family, and has to deal with bickering teenagers instead.
Relationships: Ezra Bridger & Hera Syndulla, Garazeb "Zeb" Orrelios & Hera Syndulla, Hera Syndulla & Sabine Wren, Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla
Comments: 9
Kudos: 54





	Tabula Rasa

Everything was quiet on the  _ Ghost _ . And while there had been a time where the silence would be comforting, now it was only a reminder of what they had lost. 

Hera pulled herself out of the pilot’s seat and started down the corridor to her cabin. Chopper twittered at her as she passed by him, but she didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything she could say to the droid at this point. She had used up all the words she had when she attempted to comfort Ezra and reassure Kanan that everything would be alright. That it was okay for them to take a step back from the Rebellion and focus on healing themselves. 

Not that she had had many words to offer them in the first place. Her own grief over what had happened, and what might have been, was sharp; as sharp as it had been when she lost her mother during the Clone War. 

She stopped outside the door to her room. Her hand reached out to press the button to open her door before she paused. Her mind raced, trying to think of what she would see on the other side of the door. Would Kanan be asleep? Like he had been many times before when she came in to check on his bandages? Would he be meditating due to whatever nightmare he’d experienced? Would he even be willing to put up with her presence? 

It was a ridiculous line of thought, and Hera dismissed it from her mind. She pressed the button and walked through the door with her head held high, like she always did. 

Kanan was sitting up in bed, his hands limply running over the blanket she had thrown over him when she left his side that morning. 

“Kanan?” Hera asked quietly. “How are you feeling?” 

For a moment, Kanan didn’t answer her question. Then he turned his face, his beautiful, bandaged face, to her and attempted to give her a reassured look. The bandage diminished much of the meaning he had put into it. 

“Was this the blanket we got while we were on one of Rion’s moons?” There was something in his voice. Something that made Hera want to crawl underneath the blanket next to him and just stay there. 

Hera cleared her throat and stepped to the side of her bed. She reached out and dropped her hand to rest on top of his. She couldn’t feel the soft material through her gloves, but she knew what the blanket felt like without having to touch it. How many times had she pulled it out and slept with it when she and Kanan were apart? 

“It is.” 

Kanan hummed in the back of his throat and ran his hand over the blanket once again. It was a contented sound. One that soothed a rattled part of Hera that she wasn’t aware was rattled. She watched as Kanan slid to one side of the bed and patted the spot he had just vacated. 

Hera didn’t hesitate. She lifted the blanket and slipped into the spot he had just been. It was warm. Her shoulders lost some more tension. She didn’t dare lean into Kanan, not while he was still recovering from his injury, but for a moment, in his residual warmth, it was almost good enough. 

She only allowed herself a moment before her anxiety reared its ugly head again, and her hands were twisting in the soft down of the blanket. 

“Do you feel strong enough to join us for dinner tonight?” She asked. Hera had not seen Kanan join them for dinner since the mission to Malachor. 

The truth was that it had been longer than that, but when you lived on the run from the Empire, there was barely any time to sit down to eat, let alone actually cook anything. It was only since they’d arrived on Atollon that they were able to reinstate communal meals. 

“I’m sure that the kids would appreciate seeing your face. It’s been a while.” 

Hera didn’t have to say that it was she that really wanted him present at the table. Kanan understood. 

Kanan lifted a hand and scrubbed it across the lower half of his face. The sound of his palm running over the freshly grown facial hair made it through the protective covers around her ear cones, and Hera wondered if she should offer to give him a shave. Or if she should get used to the full beard that Kanan would be sporting soon enough. 

“Yeah, I’ll come down.” Kanan paused. “Although, I suppose that means that I’ll have to put actual pants on now then?” 

Hera let out a choked laugh. It was just a glimpse of the sense of humor Kanan had possessed before his fateful mission, and Hera had feared that it would disappear forever under the new cloud of trauma and grief that had settled over Kanan. Hera couldn’t help the swell of joy inside her at the terrible joke. 

She reached out and covered his that remained on the blanket and leaned closer to him. Gently, she pressed a kiss to his cheek, careful to keep away from the bandage and the bruises on his face. When she pulled away she could see the smile that he saved just for her on his face. 

“Dinner will be at eighteen hundred,” she said. “I’ll make sure that Zeb is aware that you’ll be needing a place to sit beside me.” 

Hera squeezed his hand before she withdrew from his side and from under the blankets. There was a lightness to her step that had been missing for a while now as she continued down the corridor to the lounge and the galley. 

Zeb would be in the galley by now, going through their stores and deciding what he was going to do to make their rations resemble something more like actual food, rather than the tasteless rehydrated rations Hera always seemed to make when it was her turn to make dinner for everyone. 

Nobody complained about the food when Hera cooked, but that was more out of self-preservation than because of the quality of it. Hera was captain of the ship, and if they weren’t careful, they would be stuck scrubbing the carbon scoring off the hull of the  _ Ghost  _ as a punishment. 

Hera smiled at the thought. 

The smile quickly faded as the voices of her teenage charges filtered through to her. 

“What were you even thinking?”

“What was I thinking? What were you thinking? Going into my room and grabbing my stuff!”

Ezra and Sabine’s voices were biting. For a moment, Hera wished that she could go back to when the  _ Ghost  _ was filled with silence, before she dismissed that. Even if her kids were fighting, it was a better option than the feeling that everyone was walking around on eggshells. 

Still, fighting was not something she tolerated on her ship. 

Hera sighed and took her last few steps to get into the lounge and stopped short, looking at the sight in front of her. 

“What is going on here?” Her voice was sharper than she intended it to be. 

Ezra and Sabine were standing on opposite sides of the dejarik table, glaring at each other. Ezra was holding clippers in his hand and a clump of his hair in the other. When he turned to look at Hera, she saw that his hair had been cut unevenly across his whole scalp. The boy flushed at seeing Hera take in his whole appearance but stood firm. Sabine on the other side of the table, was dressed in the old shirt she always wore when she decided that she needed to change what her hair color was. Her hair was hidden from view in the makeshift cap Hera recognized whenever Sabine dyed her hair. Her hands were gloved and were covered in a thick white paste. 

Sabine only glanced at Hera before returning her dark gaze to Ezra. 

“Ezra went into my room while I was gone and took my clippers. Without asking, and while I was using them.” 

“Yeah, well, I would’ve asked you if you had been there. But you weren’t. I thought that I would be able to return them to you before you got back,” Ezra retorted. 

“And obviously you didn’t.” Sabine rolled her eyes. “Do you even know how to cut your own hair? It looks like Chopper did the job.” 

There was a sound of protest from the droid. Hera looked down at her side to see the familiar orange top by her side. He must have come in at the sound of the kids yelling. He was never one to miss out on a fight. 

He was the one that instigated them half the time. 

“Hey! At least mine is fixable!” Ezra snapped back. His grip on the clippers grew even tighter, and Hera became irrationally afraid he would cut himself. “Yours looks like you didn’t know when to stop.” 

Sabine’s lip curled and she took a step towards him. Her hands curled into fists and one raised to her shoulder, ready to swing. 

“Want to run that by me again?”

“You’re gonna look like my grandmother with all that white hair.” Ezra took a step closer to her. 

“I wasn’t gonna just leave it white. I’m not finished yet, Loth-rat.” 

Before the pair of them could get any closer to each other and actually start swinging at each other, Hera stepped forward and held her hands out to keep them from taking any more steps. Chopper’s disappointed moan reached her ear cones. She ignored him and focused on the two teenagers being held an arm’s length away from her. 

“What is the matter with the pair of you? Don’t say that kind of stuff to each other,” Hera scolded. 

Sabine and Ezra looked down at the ground before peering at each other around Hera. The anger and the drive to fight disappeared from their eyes. Their bodies lost the tension that had been building up. They looked at Hera with sheepish expressions on their faces. Ezra scratched the back of his neck and Sabine clenched and unclenched her fists, unable to rub her arms with the messy gloves on. 

“It’s okay,” Sabine said finally. “It’s consensual bullying.”

“Consensual bullying? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Hera swivelled her head to glare at each of them in turn. They couldn’t meet her gaze. 

“We didn’t really mean it,” Ezra whispered. 

Hera lifted her hand to her forehead and pressed her fingers into her temples before her hand slid across her forehead and rested against her cheek. She closed her eyes before taking a deep breath. When she opened them again, both teens had regained their ability to look directly at her. 

“I want you two to apologize to each other. After that, Sabine, please help Ezra clean up his haircut. And Ezra?” She looked at the boy. He had shot up in height since he had first joined their crew. “Ezra, you’ll be on laundry duty for the next week. Make sure to pre-soak Sabine’s gear. I don’t want a repeat of last time.” 

“Yes, Hera,” they chorused together. 

“Good.” Hera stepped back from in-between the pair of them and crossed her arms. She waited. When her silence was met with Sabine and Ezra’s, she lifted an eyebrow to indicate that she was still waiting. 

Ezra coughed. 

“I’m sorry that I insulted your hair,” he said finally. “And that I took things from your room without permission.” 

He held out his hand with the clippers in it. Sabine shot a look at Ezra’s choppy haircut before she reached out and took them. 

“And I’m sorry that I called you a Loth-rat.” Sabine paused and cleared her throat. “I could show you how to cut your own hair if you would like.”

Ezra ran his hand through his choppy hair. “Yeah. Yeah, that would be nice.” 

Satisfied, Hera took a few more steps back and everyone dispersed. Sabine left and headed toward the refresher, where she was presumably going to finish the next step of whatever her grand plan was for her hair this time. Ezra waited until she was out of sight before he walked down the corridor and vanished behind the door to the cabin he shared with Zeb. 

Hera sighed and turned to walk to the galley, only to stop when she saw that the door was being occupied. 

Zeb leaned against the door with a ladle in one of his large hands. 

Hera could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on. “How long were you watching?” 

“Long enough. When do you think they’ll realize that they’re misdirecting their grief?” He nodded toward the door both teens disappeared through. 

Hera sighed. Again. “I’m not sure.” 

She remembered when she was young and had lost her mother. Her father had thrown everything he had into the fight against the Separatists rather than grieve for his wife. Not that she had done much differently. She had spent all the free time she had fixing Chopper and learning to fly. It wasn’t until later when she let herself grieve that she realized what she had been doing. 

She wondered how long it would take for her to break down about this particular incident. 

Giving her head a little shake to clear itself of those types of thoughts, Hera turned to Zeb. 

“Kanan will be joining us for dinner tonight, so we’ll have to make sure that there is a space for him at the table.” Hera quickly glanced behind her down the corridor the rest of her family had gone. “Is there anything I can help you with tonight?” 

Zeb let out a small chuckle. He shook his head as he pushed himself away from the door frame. 

“No offense Hera, but I wouldn’t let you near any kitchen or galley with skills like yours. I’ll handle everything. Why don’t you get cleaned up a bit?”

“Why?” Hera asked. 

Zeb rolled his eyes and turned around to head back into the galley. “Because you’ve been working maintenance on the  _ Ghost  _ all day. You’re covered in oil and grease.” 

Hera looked down at herself in surprise. Zeb was right. There were large patches of grease and oil across her flight suit. She frowned at the sight. Normally she was much neater than this when it came to the maintenance of her ship. 

“You’re right,” she said, even though Zeb had left her sight. “Perhaps I should clean up a bit.” 

She brushed her hand over her flight suit, and despite what she said, she didn’t walk back to her quarters to change into a clean suit. Kanan was still there, and try as she might, there was no modifying her cabin to give the appropriate amount of space for her and her blind partner to change clothing at the exact same time. Instead she walked over to the cockpit and escaped down into the cargo bay. There were a few things that needed to be unpacked, and it wouldn’t take long. By the time she was finished, Kanan would be dressed and she wouldn’t have to worry about space in the cabin.

Hera lifted the cover to the only unopened crate in the hold and set to work. 

**Author's Note:**

> I was midst my re-watch of Rebels the other day, and was suddenly struck by the urge to write some more about my favorite space family. So I spit this out in like a day and a half. The title means "clean slate" according to Google. 
> 
> Prompt: "Don't say that kind of stuff to each other." "It's consensual bullying."


End file.
